How to build a synthetic digestive system for Marvel's Vision

Abstract

Vision is a synthezoid (android or synthetic human), a member of the Avengers, and constantly striving to be more human. In the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Vision is based on advanced robotics and bioengineering technologies. However, his body contains biological cells, and his external appearance consists of eyes, a mouth, a nose, teeth, and fingernails; traditional human attributes. Unlike humans, Vision does not eat as his metabolic energy requirements are met by a fictional alien artefact known as the Mind Stone. Nonetheless, given that Vision has eyes and a tongue, could he also have other organs? Does his body contain the organs for a synthetic digestive system? And if so, how would these organs meet his body’s metabolic energy needs? In this paper, we show how advancements in soft robotics (compliant robotic technologies made from highly deformable materials) can be combined to build an artificial digestive system. We consider the primary systems of the human digestive system – the oesophagus, stomach, intestines, and waste disposal. We show that an artificial digestive system is possible, but additional technologies are needed to support the underlying soft-robotics technologies.

Early career scientists converse on the future of soft robotics

“…Next to system integration, the makeup of harvesters itself can be a challenge as for the use in soft robotics, they need to be lightweight, robust and ideally based on flexible materials. Usable systems in this case are flexible solar cells (Pagliaro et al, 2008;Roldán-Carmona et al, 2014;Jung et al, 2019;Zimmermann and Würfel, 2020;Horii et al, 2022), solar batteries (Büttner et al, 2022) or solar supercapacitors (Berestok et al, 2021;Berestok et al, 2022;Delgado Andrés et al, 2022) as well as triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) (Wu et al, 2019;Wang, 2020), piezoelectric nanogenerators (PENGs) (Lee et al, 2018), thermoelectric generators (TEGs) (Sherkat et al, 2022), biofuel cells or microbial fuel cell (MFC) Frontiers in Robotics and AI frontiersin.org (Ieropoulos et al, 2005;Kim et al, 2007;Tauber and Fitzgerald, 2021) and hybrids system, e.g., of TENG and biofuels cells (Liu et al, 2022). These can generate electricity to power low-energy consumers for autonomous wearable sensing and transmit sensory data to microprocessors and computers.…”

“…Triboelectrics and piezoelectrics harvest energy from motion; these could be used to harvest mechanical energy in vivo. MFCs can convert nutrition and bodily fluids into energy (Ieropoulos et al, 2005;Kim et al, 2007;Tauber and Fitzgerald, 2021), TENGs can convert heat into energy, making them ideal for application on the outside of a soft robot or in an inner fluid channel. Flexible solar cells, solar batteries and solar supercapacitors need-as the name already states-access to light.…”

“…There are already a few systems, but these lack simplicity, are not electronic free and prone to failure. Some systems like the soft total artificial heart (Cohrs et al, 2017), the SoGut-artificial stomach peristalsis simulator (Dang et al, 2020), the artificial oesophagus system RoSE (Dirven et al, 2013;Dirven et al 2015;Dirven et al 2017) and the silicon-based peristaltic pump (utilizable as an artificial intestine and oesophagus) (Esser et al, 2019a;Esser et al, 2019b;Tauber and Fitzgerald, 2021) are completely soft but necessitate an external pressure supply (Menciassi and Iacovacci, 2020;Tauber and Fitzgerald, 2021;Hashem et al, 2022). There are a few commercially available artificial hearts, such as the temporary Total Artificial heart (TAH-t) (SynCardia Systems, Inc., Tucson, AZ, United States) and the AESON CARMAT TAH (Carmat, Vélizy-Villacoublay, France).…”

Engineering the Winter Soldier

“…It is safe to assume that due to the strength and performance of the arm, it has very high-power requirements. This would mean that the arm in the MCU is powered by some form of non-conventional power source, similar to the power source suggested by Tauber & Fitzgerald in their design of a digestive system for Vision [40]. I am going to assume that the vibranium arm utilizes a power supply based on vibranium.…”